One of the biggest problems about any community oriented activity is flaking. This is certainly true of rideshare. You find someone going the same way as you, decide to ride together, and at the last minute they bail. It’s the worst. At Ridejoy, we’re dedicated to really making rideshare workand that means overcoming these challenges with a great product and community. Today, we’re announcing two new features in Ridejoy that will reduce flaking and make it easier to secure your ride.

Arranging & Paying For Rides

We’ve realized that flaking typically happens during the process of coordinating ride logistics. There’s a lot of info to exchange and you never really know if the ride is “on” until basically the day of the rideshare. We wanted to make it easier to coordinate this messaging and d so you all can get back to living life and being awesome. That’s why we built Ride Arrangements.

Ride Arrangements help drivers and passengers get on the same page. If you are looking for a ride and are 100% ready to commit to a certain driver, hit that Arrange Ride button. (If you’re unsure or would like to discuss more first, message them first.) Once they’re ready, passengers can enter the details of their ride right there.

After all the ride details are settled, there’s one more piece to the puzzle: payment. We know that many people handle rideshare costs via cash or by buying the driver gas at a pit stop. But sometimes it’s nice to get all the money stuff out the way early on. So we’ve set up an option where drivers can take payment for their share of the ride cost during the Arrangement process.

Drivers — you are in control of your payment options. We currently have three options: CC only, CC + Cash or Cash only. If you choose CC, Ridejoy will add a small fee to cover our costs. Let’s take a look at how this plays out in detail!

EXAMPLE: Arranging a Ride With Abel

Let’s say you want to get a ride with our friend Abel from San Francisco to Los Angeles. (This is a real ride!) You see that you’re going on the exact same day and also have some jamming tunes on your iPod/iPhone that you want to share. Go ahead and hit that Arrange Ride button.

Abel's Ride look good? Let's go! (Click to enlarge)

That takes you to step 1 and 2 of the ride arrangement flow – which just let’s you know what you’re getting yourself into.

Getting started with the arrangement. (Click to enlarge)

You enter in your ride details including where you want to be picked up and dropped off, as well as your preferred time of departure, phone number and any notes on you and your situation.

Make sure you get the details right! (Click to enlarge)

 Finally, figure out how you want to pay. If you choose credit card, you’ll be asked to input your information on the spot.

Almost there! (Click to enlarge)

And that’s it!

The Driver will receive an email notifying them of a new Ride Arrangement. They can then login to Ridejoy and accept or decline. If they accept, they’ll receive the Passenger contact phone number and the ride is on!

If the Passenger and Driver agreed to share trip costs via Credit Card, they’ll be billed upon acceptance of the Ride Arrangement. The funds will be held in escrow by Ridejoy until after the ride occurs, at which point it will be moved to the Driver’s account balance. Drivers can choose to be paid out by Paypal or check.

One last thing! Our Cancellation Policy:

NOTE: This policy only applies to arrangements in which passengers pay via Credit Card. No charges will be made to passengers for any arrangement that is canceled before noon (12:00pm PST) the day before the ride departs. You can cancel your arrangement by going to your arrangements page.